We Are Asking the Wrong Question About Joe Biden on this Fourth of July
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</picture>To paraphrase an old Richard Pryor joke, “Who are you going to believe? Me, or your own lying eyes?”
Since the presidential debate last week, the leaders of the Democratic Party, in full 5-alarm fire mode, want us to believe we didn’t see what we saw.
“It was just a cold.”
“Everybody has an off night.”
“Ok, so it wasn’t his best performance.”
“All presidents have one bad debate.”
“You’re not going to judge 52 years of public service by 90 minutes of a lousy debate, are you?”
“He’s 81! What do you expect? You’ll be 81 someday!”
“He’s not a quitter. He’s all in. This is Scranton Joe we’re talkin’ about!”
“Yeah. Sure. The debate was a disaster. So what?”
These answers are all malarkey. That’s probably because we are asking the wrong question when we ask “What are we going to do about Joe?”
Maybe we should be asking what are we going to do about ourselves — and what can we do to get him some help?
Perhaps we should start with a definition of terms. Why do people keep calling it a “debate?” Isn’t that kind of like saying Israel is at “war” with Hamas? After all, if it’s a “war,” don’t there have to be things like armies, tanks, fighter jets, aircraft carriers, and the threat of nuclear annihilation on both sides? If only one side has these things, and the other side has none of them, is it really a war?
Was it really a debate if one of the debaters is so mentally and physically incapacitated that he cannot complete a sentence, randomly flips between discussing abortion, the three trimesters of a pregnancy and how great his golf game is, then looking around, unable to find one of the four cameras pointing at him, he suddenly turns his head all the way to the left as if he were looking for Rhode Island, and then out of nowhere raises his voice and shouts, “WE FINALLY BEAT MEDICARE!” Not Ohio State, but Medicare.
We saw and we heard all of that, no matter what the Party hacks keep telling us. It was heartbreaking. It was truly, without equivocation, unlike anything any of us had ever seen. No matter where you stood on the Joe Biden scale, from Joe the Working Class Hero to Joe the Banker of Palestinian Ethnic Cleansing, one thing was certain: This was not a cold. This was a human being in utter collapse. Not just political collapse, or performance collapse, but rather a full frontal lobe meltdown where at any moment you had to wonder… was it possible that the sweet and fragile existence we call “life” was about to short-circuit, or worse, lose power (to Trump)? And that no amount of shouting “STAT!” or cutting quickly to a commercial break was going to restore the President-cum-Patient to full capacity in order to save this even more fragile Democracy.
Do not mistake my criticisms of Biden spending 9 months in the loving embrace of Bibi Netanyahu as meaning that I do not deeply appreciate his 3 years of being the most progressive President of my lifetime. That’s right, my friends, there has been more action taken, through executive orders and legislation, to protect the environment, more government officials appointed who are, in their heart of hearts, Democratic Socialists, more serious funding to lift millions out of poverty, more support for labor unions, libraries, single mothers and college students deep in debt. And he has had this fervent, almost religious zeal to fight greed and obscene profits due to a true compassion he has for those dealt a bad hand in life — and he has had more of all of that than all the good presidents like Kennedy, Obama, and Carter were able to muster.
He will have another mini stroke in the next few months (he’s probably had one or two already) and then, sadly, the decline will not be reversed. Best to make a plan now and not wait until October. This is not about whether he’s fit to serve another four years — this is about whether he should serve another four days in the toughest job in the world. That’s the question we should be asking. If he offered to drive you from Flint to Detroit tonight, would you get in the car?
I’m not a doctor. I could be (and hopefully am) wrong about all this. But I do have eyes. They don’t lie. I, like nearly every one of you, had (or currently have) four grandparents and two parents (some of you have even more, with wonderful step-parents and step-grandparents). And if you yourself are over the age of 40, your eyes have seen it, too. The slow decline of your elders, followed by a sudden incident or event and then, without warning, your loved one is confused, not sure where he or she is at, can’t find the keys, can’t find the rest of the thought she just had, or the ability to even end the sentence he was in the middle of. It’s all quite normal and to be expected — and it will visit all of us one day. It won’t feel good. It won’t look pretty. But more than likely, that feeble, humbling moment will not be televised LIVE to an audience of 2 billion people around the world, with Jake Tapper’s hot breath breathing down your neck and telling you, ironically, that your time is up. Who exactly is Jake Tapper, you might ask yourself at 81. It won’t matter. Because at that point, when you suddenly blurt out that there are “1,000 trillionaires in America!” and you’ve spent your presidency trying to make them just pay their friggin’ taxes but now you realize these rich-ass barbarians are at your gate — well, then, nothing will really matter.
I’m sorry, my friends, but if I have to be the only one to stand for Joe Biden, to protect him from the cruelest form of elder abuse I’ve ever been forced to watch, well then that’s what I’ll do. He was in epic distress that Thursday night. Every cognitive default in his mind was shutting down. If this had been someone you truly cared about, loved, embraced — what would you have done? Would you have seriously even let him go out on that stage? Who would send an 81-year-old out onto any stage to debate a living monster at 9 o’clock at night for a brawl that would
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